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For the first time
since 1992, Grant Wood's Corn Room Mural will be shown in its entirety.
The permanent installation of the mural will be accompanied by a small,
rotating group of Regionalist prints from the permanent collection.

The mural was initially donated to the Art Center in 1986
by Tower Properties, Ltd., but when the corporation went into bankruptcy
in 1989, the courts made the donation invalid and ordered it to be sold
at auction. In 1995, this auction was held at the Sioux City Art Center,
and the mural was purchased by Sioux City attorney Alan Fredregill for $80,000.
He spent the next year looking for a permanent home for the Corn Room, ultimately
donating it to the Art Center where it was accessioned into the permanent
collection.

Corn Room is a significant
transitional work for Wood's development. His conception of Regionalism,
the only Modernist art movement to come out of the Midwest, emerges in this
mural. We can see his embrace of the local subjects and native landscape
familiar from Wood's mature, Regionalist works of the 1930s, but the mural
is executed in an earlier, painterly technique where he created his imagery
by removing paint from the prepared canvas. This subtractive technique resulted
in severe damage to the canvas when it was covered in the 1950s. The conservation
process saved the mural, but the resulting damage has dimmed the imagery
and shifted his colors towards the golden-brown visible today.

The mural, when seen in the context of the other works
in the exhibition by Wood, provides visitors with the opportunity to see
how Wood matured as an artist, developing the style that brought him national
and international recognition. The Fredregill Fund, established by the Sioux
City Art Center's share of the auction selling price, has allowed the acquisition
of a number of Regionalist prints by Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry and
Thomas Hart Benton that will be on display with Grant Wood's Corn Room.

Wall texts from the exhibition gallery

Grant Wood (1891-1942)

biography

Grant Wood is the only artist born in Iowa with an international
reputation. His best-known painting, American Gothic (1930), has
become an iconic image of rural America. Wood spent the majority of his
art career living and working in Cedar Rapids. He was the head of the Iowa
section of the Public Works of Art Project which ran from 1933-1934.

Wood was the most prominent artist in the Regionalist art
movement in the 1930s, and he remained a proponent of its approach to art
for the remainder of his career. This movement was a democratic art accessible
to everyone and reflecting local, rather than imported from Europe or elsewhere,
interests and traditions. The ideas Regionalism describe are connected to
the immediate, local audience for the art.

The Corn Room Mural is a typical example of the
kinds of landscape visible in the surrounding countryside, and its genesis
-- as one of four murals commissioned by a local businessman, Eugene Eppley,
for hotels in Council Bluffs, Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, and Sioux City --
describes the types of relationship between artist and audience Wood hoped
Regionalism would foster everywhere in America. This close connection between
artist, community, and locale was an essential part of the broader agenda
of Regionalism.

the process

Wood's technique in painting this mural was subtractive
-- his assistant Carl Eybers would put a thin layer of paint on a prepared
section of the canvas, and Wood would then wipe away from that paint to
create the corn stalks, buildings and other imagery visible. The mural is
faded today both because of this subtractive technique and because it was
painted over. The lengthy conservation process to remove the paint and wallpaper
that covered up Wood's painting could not restore it to its original brightness.

This mural was originally painted as a decoration for the
Martin Hotel in Sioux City. It was one of four murals commissioned by Eugene
Eppley for the dining rooms of his hotels in Sioux City, Council Bluffs,
Cedar Rapids and Waterloo. Painted around 1927, The Corn Room Mural is
an important early example of Wood's emerging Regionalist approach. It is
one of his first works to be drawn specifically from local concerns, and
it prefigures his shift towards a more highly detailed realism following
his 1928 trip to Munich, Germany, to supervise the manufacture of the Memorial
Window for the Cedar Rapids Veteran's Memorial Building.

the historical context

Grant Wood's Corn Room Mural is historically important
because it shows that Wood was developing the ideas and approaches that
would become Regionalism several years before he produced his first clearly-Regionalist
works and achieved critical success with his invention: Woman with Plants
(1929) and American Gothic (1930). Both these paintings have their
origins in the specific landscape of the Midwest, but fuse their local subjects
with formal concerns drawn from seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Wood's
concerns with landscape, visible in the Corn Room Mural, remain a
constant reference point for his Regionalist works: it appears as the background
to Woman with Plants and in the famous house seen behind the couple
in American Gothic. The central imagery in one of the main panels
-- conical piles of harvested corn -- reappears in his later work, notably
as the central focus of his lithograph, January (1937), in the painting
Iowa Cornfield (1941), and in his last known work, an oil sketch
from 1941 called Iowa Landscape.

This mural was papered over in the early 1950s and forgotten
until it was rediscovered in 1979 by Leah Hartman, an interviewer for the
Siouxland Oral History Program. Her interview with Carl Eybers, Wood's assistant
in painting the Martin Hotel mural, led to its being removed from the Hotel
and conserved by the Sioux City Art Center. Tower Properties Ltd., the owners
of the Martin Hotel donated the mural to the art center in the 1980s after
its recovery, but when they filed for bankruptcy in 1989, the future of
the mural in Sioux City was uncertain. Alan Fredregill purchased the mural
at the auction and donated it to the Art Center so it would remain in Sioux
City.

Grant Wood's Corn Room mural

The permanent installation of the mural has been underwritten,
in part, by Bill Turner.

Eugene Eppley commissioned this mural from Grant Wood in
1927 as a decoration for the dining room of the Martin Hotel in Sioux City.
It is one of four murals commissioned by a regional businessman, Eugene
Eppley, for hotels in Council Bluffs, Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, and Sioux
City.

The mural is a typical example of the kinds of landscape
visible in the surrounding countryside. It was originally painted so it
filled the room, creating an environment that had the effect of standing
in a corn field in Iowa. Its installation reproduces some of this effect.

Grant Wood was the main promoter of Regionalism,
the American art movement that emerged in the Midwest in the early 1930s
and continued into the early 1940s. Like Wood's mature, Regionalist
works of the 1930s, the Corn Room employs subject matter drawn specifically
from local concerns, and it prefigures his shift towards a more highly detailed
realism following his 1928 trip to Munich, Germany, to supervise the manufacture
of the Memorial Window for the Cedar Rapids Veteran's Memorial Building.
While some critics considered these rural, predominately agrarian subjects
to be stylistically native to America, others argued they were signs of
a hopelessly provincial approach to art. Regionalism was both praised as
the source, or damned as a backwater to American art.

American Gothic, Present at the Creation from Morning Edition, November 18, 2002 with links also
to "Centennial of Grant Wood's Birth" (June 6, 1991) and "an
interview with James Dennis, author of Grant Wood: A Study in American
Art and Culture". (February 13, 1976)

Amazon.com's feature that allows people on the Web to read text inside books
including

American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting
-- by Steven Biel

American Gothic : The Biography of Grant Wood's American
Masterpiece -- by Thomas Hoving

American Gothic -- by Michael
Romke

To use this feature, search in "books," then
enter title of book. When book is selected go to "look inside"
and read sample pages of the book selected, which may include color images
of the front cover, front flap, table of contents, excerpt such as the introduction
chapter, alphabetical index, back flap and back cover. These books on American
Gothic also have a word search feature, which enables registered individuals
to search inside the books and pull up individual pages containing the selected
words. [Click here for more on Amazon.com's
project and other digitizing initiatives.]

Grant Wood's America: 29
minutes, 1986 from the PBS special of the same name. "American Gothic
is the painting that established Grant Wood's reputation. The memorable
portrait begins this documentary about this well-known American artist.
One can imagine that Wood, who possessed a wry sense of humor, would appreciate
the many parodies of his famous image that have since been created. The
film covers Wood's life and artistic development, placing special emphasis
on the growth of his distinctive Regionalist style and his interest in
American traditions." Quote from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Visions of California: The Story
of California Scene Painting, produced by Paul Bockhorst for KOCE Public
Television in collaboration with The Irvine Museum, is the 1994 story of
California Scene Painting 1925-1950. Bockhorst, working with scores of
collectors and dozens of institutions and museums nationwide, has created
a three-part series of artistic delight and intellectual insight that features
almost 150 works of art.

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